Learning Kids Games: 3D

Showing posts with label 3D. Show all posts

Monday, March 23, 2009

Great Collection of Short Films

I was first attracted to The Hyde Tube because of it's fantastically simple interface, but once I started looking at the content I was really knocked out by its huge collection or really great short movies.

They have been divided into 3 simple categories.

When you click on one of the thumbnail images, the video opens in the top left of screen. I was also pretty impressed by how fast everything loaded. My first impression, from the name (including 'Tube') was that this was yet another YouTube ap, but it looks like the films are unique content.

This kind of short visually powerful material is great for language classes and a great way to stimulate discussion and descriptive language use. Even something as simple as getting students to watch and develop a narrative for a clip can work well.

If you click on the share link above a video it will also provide you with a unique URL for that video so you can direct students to the ones you want them to watch.

Great stuff, free, all really simple and great to see that YouTube doesn't have ALL the best content.

Here are some of my Video activities for EFL ESL students

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A Virtual World for Teens

New 3D virtual worlds seem to be appearing almost everyday at the moment and here's another one. It's called Hangout and is still in private beta at the moment, so if you want to have a look around you'll need to apply for an invitation.

This one claims to be designed for teens and if you watch the video on the homepage, it does look as though it will appeal to that age group.

It looks like each person will be able to have their own room which they will customise. The graphics look nice and there's a good level of customisation of the various rooms. They are boasting both voice and text chat and the ability to create audio playlists and videos in the rooms.

It doesn't say yet if it will be free, but there is mention of credit card payments on the terms of use, though this might not be for membership.

The terms of use also say that user between 13 and 17 need to get their parents approval to register, so hopefully they are taking security seriously.

Anyway, this could be one to watch if you're looking for an alternative to Second Life.

Related links:

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, September 5, 2008

Educational Games That Really Are Fun

It's often been a criticism of many attempts to make MMORPG computer games educational, that when that happens the fun goes. I have to say that it is often the case, but I think Power Up is an exception.

Power up is an educational computer game based around the concept of helping students to understand the need for clean energy. It takes the scenario of a planet ( set in the future) which needs rescuing.

The game looks and feels convincing and has some nice collaborative game play thrown in with some blasting of alien beasts. Students can play it alone or in multi-player mode. They are assigned missions that they have to complete and there is even use of some text to speech.

There are ready made lesson plans for teachers as well as a section for parents with advice on child safety.

The game is free, but you will have to download the software (200Mb!) which takes about 40Mins on a good broadband connection (and lots longer on a bad one)

It's great that the quality of these games is improving so much. This would be a really motivating game for students to play to learn more about clean energy and also good for intermediate + EFL ESL students as they would need to work at understanding the instructions to progress through the game. Also great to base a CLIL lesson around.

Definitely a serious game to be taken seriously. Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Online Water Conservation Game

Educational games seem to be getting much better these days and Catchment Detox is a great example of that. It's an online game which you can play in the browser without any software downloads. It has similar gameplay to something like Zoo Tycoon, with students making budgeting decisions and deciding what areas to develop each year for 50 years.

Students have to manage a catchment area, protect the environment, develop the agricultural resources and balance this against conserving water and water quality.

There's a good video demo here showing how it's done: How to play

I had a go at this game and was fascinated. The language level is quite high, so non native speakers of English would need to be of a good level to cope without a lot of support. It would be a great way of developing their environment related vocabulary though.

It's great to see educational games are really being taken seriously in Australia. This is a great example of game that can really make students think, but still keep them motivated.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A Virtual World for Facebook Users

Do you want to show your virtual EFL ESL students images, videos from YouTube or just chat with them all within a 3D environment that runs in your web browser. Well now you can.

I've just been playing with Vivaty a new 3D virtual world that runs from within your web browser with only a minimal download (4.5Mb).

The strange thing about it though is that it runs from within Facebook!

Despite this it's quite good and quite easy to set up and customise. You can also easily add pictures or videos to your own personal room. Within a few mins I had managed to add a TV screen to my room and configure it to play a video from my YouTube channel.

Here's my avatar watching me doing a video presentation!

Once you've downloaded the 4.5Mb program and installed it, you simply log into your face book account and your room appears at the bottom of your profile page and you just click to enter the room.

There are also a selection of other rooms that you can visit if you want to meet other people to chat with.

Vivaty certainly doesn't have the rich graphics and degree of customisation that you can get from something like Second Life, but it is a much smaller download, runs in your browser (Internet Explorer only - Sorry MAC only users!) and or use with EFL ESL students, it is much safer (that's if you trust Facebook to protect your privacy!).

For me though, the strongest thing in its favour is the potential to watch, share and chat about videos whilst in a simple online environment.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG

Wonderland looks like a great free online role playing game for younger students. The game is based around the story of some travelers who become shipwrecked and have to survive by doing various tasks, quests and challenges. The graphics look like the typical Japanese manga cartoons which are so popular with kids and teens.

What I really like about this is that the 'things to do' type quests and challenges are already there and built in so , unlike virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com you and your students don't have to think up things to do.

I think this is really good motivating game to get students using English to solve problems and work collaboratively. If you can get your students hooked on a game like this they'll do the learning for themselves.

On the negative side, they will need to download the software and that's over 500Mb, so they'll need broadband and a reasonably up to date computer. The game is also quite complex and I can't find any information regarding minimum ages for registration.

That said, if your students are keen gamers and have an intermediate level of English or higher and you want to motivate them to work on their own, this could be a wonderful tool for getting them to do that.

Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?

Have Google joined the online 3D virtual world market? Well it looks like they have, but it looks like it's still pretty early days with the Beta release of Lively.

Lively certainly seems to have a lot of potential and a lot of good things going for it, in addition to having the might of a company like Google behind it.

The 3D rooms run in the browser and only require the download of a very small plugin (about half a MB) as opposed to the huge downloads that Second Life and There.com require.
Anyone can create their own room, pretty quickly and easily, and embed the room into a web page like the one below.
The rooms aren't connected so if you want to use this with students, it's less risky as they are less prone to 'wandering' into unsuitable areas.
The amount of customization of both avatars and rooms is limited at the moment, so this might well help to discourage the more 'adult' orientated users who tend to crop up in Second Life so much.
Word is that you can add and watch YouTube videos within your 3D room, which could make a nice addition to a distance course and enable your students to have film / video night together.
The 3D comic book type graphics look good and would surely appeal to teens or younger learners.
It's free at the moment at least.

Here is my 3D room embedded into my page

But this is what it should look like!

Before you get too excited though:

I've had more than a few problems getting this to work for me either in Firefox 3 or IE 7 and you can't run it on a MAC yet.
Lots of the tools for editing the room and avatar that appear in the help instructions, never seem to appear on my screen, so once I've created my room, I don't seem to be able to edit it at all.
There's no voice chat only text chat.
Because it's only just been launched the actual population is still pretty small, so actually meeting someone to talk to is a bit of a challenge

Anyway, despite all this, I think this is still one to watch, not only because it has Google behind it, but because if it can be made to work well and run in the browser with lower demand on bandwidth and small downloads, this could open up the potential of virtual worlds to many more people and that can't be a bad thing.

Some of my other postings on virtual worlds.

Best Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Spore Creature Creator

I've just been having a look at the Creature Creator from Spore, the much anticipated game from EA. The Creature Creator should be available for download from Tuesday 17th June from the Spore site, though the game itself won't be released until September I believe.

There's a great article on Webware which describes all the amazing Web2.0 type features that gamers will have access to. These include the ability to create video and images and upload them directly to YouTube (great for machinima projects), as well as the ability to share creations for other gamers to work on and also each creature gamers create will become part of a Wikipedia style collection of information on all the Spore creatures created.

I think for educators, this must be one of the most exciting and potentially useful games ever created, as gamers will have the opportunity to design creatures from the microbial stage and nurture them and control their environment as they develop.

Anyway, I'll be queuing up next week to download (300mb) of Creature Creator and start designing my own creatures. Sadly the Creature Creator part isn't free, but at just under 5 GBP it's certainly not expensive.

Hope to be posting some of my own creations soon.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Building in Second Life

Over the last few weeks I've been creating quite a long series of video tutorials for teachers wishing to use Second Life. These have been created on Edunation Island for the The Consultants-E and are to be used as part of one of their short courses that they run in Second Life.

I'm also in the process of adding these to my YouTube channel which you can find at: http://www.youtube.com/nikpeachey

This week I've started by adding a series of four tutorials on the basics of building and also one on setting up voice for SL. I'll be adding a few more each week.

You can see the first one on setting up voice here.

You can see the playlist of Second Life tutorials here

I've also added all of my WetPaint Wiki tutorials, so hopefully this will make them more accessible and also provide an embed code for anyone who wants to use them elsewhere.

The WetPaint wiki playlist is here.

Hope you find these useful

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Open source video animation

Big Buck Bunny, may sound like a rather dodgy name for an online video, but it is in fact the latest product from a company called The Blender foundation.

What's special about Big Buck Bunny is that it is a Pixar quality 3D animated movie made completely with free software and all the files and assets from the movie have been made under creative commons license so that others can contribute and develop more movies using those assets.

Anyway have a look at the product. This version is from Youtube, but you can access their site and download high quality and find out more about the project here.

This is a really wonderful project and a great movie. Time to start looking at how it can be used for language development.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Friday, May 16, 2008

YouTube for IWBs with PicLens

While I was checking links yesterday for the posting to my learning technology blog, I was delighted to see that PicLens have added YouTube support for their browser plugin.

Click here or on the image to watch a movie showing how it works (2.2 Mb)

This is one of my favourite plugins and I think it's a fantastic teaching tool, especially for those with IWBs (interactive whiteboards) or data projectors in class. (See my Learning technology blog posting for teachging ideas for ELT).

This addition of YouTube support means that we can now get full screen Youtube videos direct to the classroom without any of the distracting text or advertising that lives on the web page, and in the fantastic PicLens 3D immersive interface.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it for free from here:

Love it

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Nik Read More..